Chrome / Chromium issue on elementary OS freya

Question

I'm having an issue with chrome and chromium on my Freya, and not a little one : It frequently crash the whole system.

I dont really now why and how to get details about that, so I'll try to be as specific as I can :

• This happen on both Google Chrome and Chromium
• The system and the two softs versions are 64-bit
• When it crash the whole system freeze. I can switch to a terminal with CTRL+ALT+X but when I switch back, the system is still freezing (so I guess it's an X interface issue ?)
• When it crash audio (music or video audio) is still running but nothing left respond
• It's not always the case, but often a select box is black when selecting an option, and a crash happen right after
• Sometime I have some peace for a long time, sometime it crash several time a day

I did my homework and search what could be the cause, and I read that the graphic acceleration can be the cause. I tried to disabled it but no change. I have this issue since the begining, with Luna back then.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

It is sounding like a graphics issue. It is a bit tough to tell based on the description. I know that I have had freezing issues with the hardware enablement stack. I chose to remove the hardware enablement stack and use updated graphics drivers. That seems to have solved my issue. I'm not sure if your issue is the same. This is how I went about doing it, I'm not sure if I am just lucky that this worked so:

Please make sure you back up your entire system before doing this so you can fully restore it in case this breaks something and leaves your system unusable

Revert the graphics stack to the Trusty version with:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg

This may break the touchpad/mouse drivers so install them with:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Afterwards I added the oibaf ppa to update the Trusty graphics drivers as I couldn't before. I understand Oibaf is not compatible with the Hardware Enablement Stack

ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers

This is the oibaf website with other instructions: https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers

Alternatively the website https://askubuntu.com/questions/265999/how-to-remove-kernel-lts-enablement-stack has instructions that detail how to remove the hardware enablement stack for the ubuntu 12.04 you might be able to use them to figure out how to do it in elementary OS.

Ultimately you have to decide how much this troubles you and how much you want to mess with your system to try and fix it. Just make sure you do full system backups before you try any of this.

I hope this helps your issues.